Who

The Legend of Zelda: Chicken Savepoint Woman

Long time readers will recall my distaste for the standard Zelda save
system. My main complaint, you will recall, is
that when you save the game from the middle of a dungeon, you have to trudge
through the whole dungeon over again when you restore the game. Why, I opined,
can’t the game just come up with a way to save my position in the dungeon and
save me from this boring grunt work?

Well, the new Zelda game _does _ fix this and yet again proves that you
should be careful what you wish for.

I think it’s the case that if a normal developer had approached this problem,
they would have made your position in the dungeon part of the save file. Then,
when you load the save file, the game would just put you back where you were.
The developers of Zelda can’t do this. They need to take the habits of long
time fans into account. These players might actually be upset that the game
didn’t do the wrong thing when they saved the game. There would be a general
hue and cry about the “save-game” glitch where you save your game, and when
you load it it loads exactly where you were when you saved. People would be
outraged. They would demand a refund, a recall, a patch DVD. Just imagine the
chaos.

Given that they have to work around this problem of a large legacy of
installed players, the developers of Twilight Princess chose to take
something that ought to be completely transparent to the player and make it
into a gameplay mechanic. Let me summarize.

Early on in the game, you find a creature in one of the dungeons. This
creature, as Pete has described, looks like a
woman with blue nipples crossed with a chicken. The chicken lets you warp from
wherever you are in the dungeon back into the outside world. When you do this,
you take the head of the chicken’s child with you and keep it in your pocket.
Using this head, you can warp back to the chicken and then keep playing.

So… to save your game and your position in the dungeon, warp out of the
dungeon, save, then when you restore you can warp back to where you were.
Don’t forget to bring the head of the baby of the chicken woman with blue
boobs!

All of this to avoid shocking their fans by giving them a save system from the
1980s. You can’t make this shit up.